Anonymous Communist

I was recently tooling around on the profoundly excellent Built St. Louis (if you like historical architecture, you’ll love this) Web site and came across BSL’s Industrial City section.

This section cataloged the perverse beauty of the St. Louis area’s once-great but decaying industrial base. Among the rusting hulks is the long-abandoned meatpacking complex in East St. Louis. The Webmaster describes the old Armour plant as such:

The Armour Meatpacking Plant has stood abandoned for nearly fifty years. Its state of decay is utterly ruinous; it is legendary in urban exploration circles. Though I first photographed it in 2001, I have yet to brave the interior — an environment I am unwilling to enter without a hard hat and a few companions.

In that 2001 photo set, he provides a link to a Web site for an urban explorer who takes on the old Armour plant. Picture in your mind what an abandoned-for-50-years, turn-of-last-century factory might look like; you’re likely thinking of Armour. There are innumerable holes in the roof, entire rooms overtaken by vegetation, rusting boilers, stripped control panels, hulking steam engines and corroded dynamos.

It’s amazing looking at all the photos, but one in particular caught my eye:

Look at the base of that dynamo. That’s right; it says “Allis-Chalmers.” Could a piece of Springfield be rotting away in East St. Louis?

As you may recall, Allis-Chalmers was one of the biggest (if not the biggest) manufacturers in Springfield in days gone by. According to unofficial (and I must stress unofficial; I don’t have immediate access to City Directories) sources unearthed by Google, Allis-Chalmers came to Springfield in 1928 by its acquisition of the local Monarch Tractor Corp.

Built St. Louis says that the Armour plant closed in 1959, so it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that the above dynamo could have been manufactured in Springfield.

But how do you determine that? I’m no expert, but I figure the only way to be sure is to get into that factory, find the dynamo and search for any kind of serial number or other identifying information. Certainly, the magic of the Internets could help decode whatever information can be found.

So who gives a shit? Well, obviously, I think it’s kinda neat. I think it’s important to acknowledge the past, especially the past of an entity that was so important to our fair city. Even if somehow that dynamo could be liberated, I’m not sure there’s any venue in town that would be appropriate for the display of such a historical object. But there is an Allis-Chalmers museum in Paris. Illinois, not France. *cough* That place apparently has a display of all kinds of A-C swag:

Three buildings make up the museum. One houses an 1950s-era Allis-Chalmers dealership display, filled with hundreds of stock parts, plus minibikes, generators, electric motors, a golf cart, Terra Tiger, several snowblowers, power units, and lots and lots of memorabilia and literature.

Maybe the proprietor, one Dale Haymaker, could shed some light on the origins of the above-pictured piece of equipment.